if a==b works as well as if (a==b)
- Removing the ability to skip the parentheses only serves to break a lot of old scripts. Now
that's going to create a lot more confusion and hard to find errors then supporting optional parentheses. For those that are worried about whether a condition can work without parentheses, well they can simply use them in all cases.
var %x = 10 works as %x = 10
- This is incorrect. Using
var declares the variable as local, whereas simply using
%x = <value> syntax will create a global variable if a local one with that name doesn't already exist. Not to mention that
var can create multiple variables, while
%x = <value> is considerably faster and can't be used from the command line. In other words there are many differences between these two ways of assigning variables.
strings dont't have "-" surrounding them etc.
- This is similar to your
if suggestion, just on a much larger scale - it would break
all existing scripts and completely change the language beyond recognition. Yes, it would make it much easier to remove the multiple consecutive spaces issue, but then again it would effectively erase the tens of thousands of scripts/addons/snippets that have been written in the last 10 years, would make a lot of people have to re-learn much of the scripting language, and would destroy the link between mIRC's langauge and IRC commands.
I certainly wouldn't call any of these changes 'small improvements'.